ASUU President Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke warned that any vice‑chancellor who misappropriates the grant given to their institution by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) deserves imprisonment. He called on the Federal Government to establish a panel to investigate the utilisation of such funds, noting that many TETFund‑funded projects were delayed because of poor financial management.
At an annual strategic planning workshop in Abuja, TETFund Executive Secretary Sonny Echono announced that President Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) had approved a N320 billion intervention fund for public tertiary education institutions in 2023. The workshop, which gathered heads of all beneficiary institutions, was intended to gather feedback and assess the performance of the agency’s intervention lines to strengthen its mandate. According to Echono, each public university will receive N1,154,732,133; each polytechnic will receive N699,344,867; and each college of education will receive N800,862,602.
In an interview on Friday, Prof. Osodeke stressed that responsibility should lie with vice‑chancellors, not with universities, students, or parents. “If they cannot retire the funds or mismanage them, they should be jailed,” he said. He pointed out that in some universities funds sit idle for four to five years, losing value, and that many TETFund projects dated 2012 or 2013 were only completed in 2023—a delay of over five years with no accountability. Judicial panels, when convened, have not released their reports, which he identified as a systemic problem.
Osodeke explained that the strike action taken by ASUU was aimed at forcing the government to set up a panel to scrutinise how institutions handle the funds. “It has been more than two years and the report is still pending,” he noted.
When asked about the impact of the N320,345,040,835 intervention fund, Osodeke said its effectiveness depends on proper disbursement and monitoring by TETFund. He emphasized that the fund is an intervention, not a funding model, and that the government should manage its own allocations. Proper oversight could yield significant benefits, but currently many universities have been unable to access their TETFund allocations for three to four years because they must retire old funds before receiving new ones. Some institutions are still working on 2019 allocations, causing the money to sit idle and waste.
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